From 7–10 May in Rovinj, DK2026 brings together the people who built the platforms, the thinking and the systems the rest of the industry is still reacting to — including Julie Supan.
Julie Supan is as elite as it gets. Before YouTube was YouTube. Before Airbnb meant more than crashing on someone’s couch. Before Dropbox, Reddit or Discord became cultural infrastructure. She was there — defining brand position, tone and go-to-market logic at the moment it actually mattered. Many of those brands haven’t fundamentally changed since. That’s not coincidence. That’s brand architecture.
As the first Head of Marketing and Communications at YouTube, Supan helped launch the platform in 2005 and shape its identity through its meteoric rise, all the way to its $1.6B acquisition by Google. And that was just the beginning. Her work never stops at logos or campaigns. She builds meaning, narrative and trust at scale — leading branding, communications, grassroots marketing, policy and cultural partnerships while the internet itself was being invented in real time. The industry noticed. Advertising Age and BrandWeek named her Marketer of the Year. Supan kept doing the work.
Today, as branding moves back to the center of business strategy, Supan is one of the few people founders and CEOs call when clarity matters more than noise. She works with only a handful of companies each year — helping them define their position, understand their audience and launch with confidence in brutally competitive spaces. A longtime guest lecturer at Stanford GSB and advisor to top VC firms, she approaches brand as architecture, not decoration.
That thinking is exactly what she brings to DK2026.
When the world gets loud, the brands that last don’t get louder — they get clearer. In her talk The Vision Advantage of Branding, drawing on first-hand experience from building YouTube, Airbnb, Dropbox and Reddit in moments when nothing was obvious, Supan shows how vision becomes direction, direction becomes momentum — and why long-term brand advantage is built early, quietly and on purpose. The strongest brands don’t chase attention. They pull people toward a future they want to belong to.
If you want to understand brand as a system — not a surface — this is where to start. Get your ticket.
